Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to attack communities that resist his hateful rhetoric about migrants. In particular, he has repeatedly stated that he will work with Congress to cut off federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities.” Like with much else, he hasn’t bothered to tell us what he means by a sanctuary city. That term is thrown around so much that without a working definition, it is hard to make sense of which cities might come under attack by a Trump anti-sanctuary move. As I wrote in Crimmigration Law, though “sanctuary policies” take a variety of forms, “they all [...]
Narratives of criminalization and resistance
“Immigrants are not criminals.” This was a frequent refrain of the mass mobilizations of 2006 that put a stop to the harshest immigration legislation to win widespread congressional support in a decade. Many immigrants’ rights advocates continued using a form of this narrative frame in the years that followed. So too did Obama Administration officials. Under his watch, ICE repeatedly touted its prioritization of “criminal aliens.” Indeed, President Obama famously described his Administration’s immigration law enforcement focus as “felons, not families.” Whatever the rhetoric’s value, the [...]
Crimmigration Law Lecture Series Resumes at Denver Law
The Crimmigration Law Lecture Series at the University of Denver is back. On Friday, October 14, three exceptional scholars will come to campus to discuss the political economy of crimmigration law. Professors Tanya Golash-Boza (University of California, Merced Department of Sociology), Amada Armenta (University of Pennsylvania Department of Sociology), and Anita Sinha (American University Washington College of Law) will lead robust discussions about mass deportation in the age of global capitalism. Along with my co-organizer and colleague Professor Christopher Lasch, I invite you to join [...]
Defining crimmigration law: Part III
A working conceptualization of crimmigration law, at least as it plays out in the United States, must start with the radical changes to substantive law that I’ve described in parts I and II of this series of essays on defining crimmigration law. But it can’t end there. As an emergent area of law, crimmigration law is highly functional. Consequently, one of its lasting—and, frankly, devastating—impacts, enforcement, merits as much attention as the substantive law previously discussed. Indeed, I give enforcement methods special attention in Part III of my book Crimmigration Law. Crimmigration [...]
Migrants, detainers, & sanctuary cities
The unfortunate death of thirty-two year old Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco allegedly at the hands of a man lacking permission to be in the United States has reignited old refrains about migrant illegality and border insecurity. Coming on the heels of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s infamous claims that many Mexican migrants are rapists or drug dealers, this sad affair has thrown political commentators and politicians into a tizzy about migrant criminality. As could be expected, Republicans have jumped on this event, the facts of which remain very unclear, to repeat their [...]
Crimmigration’s Social Foundations: Anti-Latino Attitudes Linked to Support for Discriminatory Policing
By Justin T. Pickett Immigration enforcement is a salient social and political issue in the contemporary United States. The extant evidence suggests that a key reason that many members of the public support harsh anti-immigration policies, such as building a border fence or denying emergency healthcare to illegal immigrants, is that they believe illegal immigrants hurt the U.S. by committing crimes, taking away jobs from Americans, and weakening American cultural values. At the same time, immigration enforcement is increasingly occurring through the criminal justice system, and involves [...]
Ohio students & advocates sue Border Patrol to get immigration policing records
This week students from Ohio State University’s Civil Law Clinic and the Ohio legal services group Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. (ABLE) jointly sued the Border Patrol in a continued attempt to gather documents about the agency’s immigration policing practices in northern Ohio. The students and advocates are concerned about reports of racially biased policing by the Border Patrol’s Sandusky Bay Station. Sandusky is located on the coast of Lake Erie about one hour west of Cleveland. Their suspicion is buttressed by a statistical analysis of three years of apprehension log data done [...]
Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment
Every day, roughly 33,000 people spend the night imprisoned while waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Thousands more are confined on charges of having committed an immigration crime. Others are behind bars because they were already convicted. The substantive law that applies to people in each of these categories differs: civil law governed by the Immigration and Naturalization Act for those in removal proceedings, and criminal law governed by the federal penal code (and, to a smaller degree, its state counterparts). That is largely where the [...]